The American Library Association's new January event, LibLearnX (The Library Learning Experience), began this past weekend; the now-virtual four-day conference originally had been planned to take place in-person in San Antonio, Tex.
The opening session on Saturday featured ALA President Patricia Wong, the first Asian American to serve as president of the ALA, in conversation with Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D., Hawaii), the first Asian American woman and only immigrant serving in the U.S. Senate and the first Senator in history born in Japan. Hirono's memoir, Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter's Story (Viking), "chronicles her life as a woman coming into her own power over the course of five decades in public service."
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| Patty Wong (l.) and Mazie Hirono | |
Wong asked Hirono what inspired her to write her memoir. "It was my desire to tell my mother's story," Hirono explained. She spoke of her mother's resilience and "risk-taking": "I knew what courage it took for her to bring us to a new country, to start a new life for us.... My mother's determination is something I always aspire to." Hirono also discussed her roots in literature: "Books are a huge part of my life." Her love of reading, she said, was awakened by an elementary school teacher reading her class Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers. And, she said, she has learned that "reading is one of the ways that one becomes a better writer." Hirono also noted that reading Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique in college changed her life. "Wait a minute," she thought, "I need to make my own way in life. Why did I think some guy was going to come along and take care of me?" Wong pointed out that "one of our core values in libraries is intellectual freedom," and Hirono agreed that "we have to push back against efforts to limit what we have access to and what we are taught."
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| Angeline Boulley | |
The morning "theater speaker," Angeline Boulley, a storyteller who writes about her Ojibwe community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, discussed her debut YA novel, Firekeeper's Daughter (Holt), about a young Ojibwe woman who goes undercover to help track down a dangerous drug. The novel is a 2021 Kids' Indie Next List pick, a Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time selection, a Reese's YA Book Club pick and is slated to be adapted by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground.
Boulley gave the audience a history of Firekeeper's Daughter: when she was a senior in high school, she read, for the first time, "a book that featured a Native American main character." But she felt "unsettled"--the author was not Native and the "representation played into some stereotypes that were inauthentic" to her. "Reading that book made me realize the importance of reading books where we can see ourselves reflected." That same year, she learned from one of her friends who attended a different school that a new student had turned out to be an undercover officer. The story took root.
"As an Indigenous person who has light skin, I was always wondering if I was Native enough," Boulley said, and she watched as her own children went through "identity issues" about "how Native they were." So Firekeeper's Daughter became "a story about identity, claiming your identity as an Indigenous person and finding your place in the world, particularly in your Native community." Finally, after a lot of research--including attending a workshop on methods of making meth and how to identify meth labs--she had a "eureka" moment. She "was thinking about our hero story" (which focuses on a sometimes-trickster figure named Nanabozho) when she noticed that visual representations of the Hero's Journey are laid out in a circle with four quadrants, similar to the Ojibwe Medicine Wheel. She thought, "I can tell the hero's journey from an Indigenous young woman's perspective, using the medical wheel as a... framework for telling the story I want to tell."
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| Grace Kindle and Charly Palmer | |
In the afternoon Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe-winning illustrator Charly Palmer discussed his author-illustrator debut, The Legend of Gravity, which came out earlier this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From his personal art studio, he and his editor, Grace Kindle, discussed his tall tale about a neighborhood basketball hero. Palmer highlighted the importance of the reader to all his works--how wonderful it feels to "inspire a young person to do something more than they thought they were capable of." He and Kindle talked about nicknames and their power, and the lesson Palmer set out to teach in The Legend of Gravity: "Do your best. Give all or don't do it at all." The conversation finished with a painting demonstration from Palmer. Before he began work, he said, "I say to young people all the time, find something you enjoy doing and you'll never have to work a day in your life. I sometimes feel guilt [because of] how much fun I have doing what I do." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness